In this lesson, you will learn to determine if your house is prepared for wildfire season. To begin, play the Firewise game to see what you know.
There are several steps we can take to analyze our home's readiness. For starters, we can make sure that there isn't fuel close enough to the house to RADIATE heat that could ignite the house. (The minimum safe distance between your house and any potential RADIANT HEAT sources is 30 feet.) Next, definitely make sure there isn't any fuel TOUCHING the house-because if it burns, the flames can touch the house too, and ignite the walls or roof or gutters.
What else can we do? A very important step we can take is to make sure our house is made out of things that aren't going to burn. What about our roof? Can we keep those flying embers from landing there? Maybe not, but we can have a roof that won't catch fire at all. Think for a moment: what kinds of things don't catch fire? Stone, metal, tile, and cement are a few. Those are called NON-FLAMMABLE materials. If they take a really long time to burn, they are still flammable, but we say they are FIRE-RESISTANT. Can we keep firebrands from going under our decks and porches? We can. A good idea is to install screening around the bottoms of decks and porches. What about your windows? Glass won't catch fire, but it can break if it gets hot enough. Then what happens? That's right, flames or embers can come right in through the broken window and ignite things inside the house.
If we make our homes out of materials that don't become FUEL for the fire, that is one way to break the fire triangle. If we get rid of most of the FUEL on the ground surface and keep flames from igniting CROWNS of the trees, we can reduce how much HEAT is being generated during the fire - smaller flames have less heat - think about how easy it is to put out a match or a candle. In the upcoming lessons, you are going to be learning how to make homes Firewise by getting rid of the fuel on and around the house, and protecting spots around the home that could be ignited by a fire.